Governments should play very little or no role in determining what people are allowed to say and hear, regardless of whether this may be ‘offensive’ to the traditional enemies of liberty—primarily religious fanatics—or to those of a weaker ‘moderate’ disposition who would passively give up ‘their’ freedom to buy a little peace and quiet. Yet today there are few legal or moral principles that have come under greater sustained attack.

Steve Edwards points out that anti-discrimination activists seem to consider the incitement of hatred as defensible so long as the intended victims are bourgeois. Controversially, he writes that if we truly wished to ban religious hatred, we would have to ban religion itself.